Multidisciplinary artist Aya Ben Ron is known for her distinct practice, which ranges from site-specific projects to installations, films, and collaborations with medical institutions. Her work explores our systems of care and examines themes such as illness, trauma, and recovery. In her work, the artist looks into the cultural and historical conditions of giving and receiving care, and maps the imperceptible connections between caregiving and the power relations embedded in Western societal structures.
A. Ben Ron holds a BFA from HaMidrasha Faculty of the Arts (1991) and an MFA from Goldsmiths, University of London (1999). Her early works feature a bold exploration of the body and are characterised by their seductive aesthetic. Hanging (2001–2013) – which was originally installed in the staircase of the Wellcome Trust’s building in London – is a dynamic expression of A. Ben Ron’s interest in the visual language used by modern science. In this twenty-five-metre fibreglass banner, illustrations from medical textbooks were digitally re-drawn as a colourful kaleidoscope of intensely ornamental images that chart the cycle of life. With its massive scale and extraordinary imagery, the work challenges the dialectics of scientific representation.

A. Ben Ron often exhibits her work in unconventional spaces, many of them relating to medicine and its history. An example of this is her exhibition A Voyage to Cythera (2012), which was presented at the Berlin Museum of Medical History. The exhibition included an intervention designed to respond to the museum’s collection, and to scrutinise presentations of the human body in medical literature and art. Blurring the boundaries between the two realms, the project subverted traditional approaches to observation and highlighted A. Ben Ron’s interest in rendering the invisible visible.

In 2019, she represented Israel at the 58th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, where she presented Field Hospital X (2019). A modular care institution and registered NGO, Field Hospital X was offered as a response to the ailments of contemporary society. Field Hospital X questioned the prospect of consolation and provided a safe space where silenced voices could be heard, where repressed emotions could rise to the surface, and where visitors could practice empathy. This elaborate and comprehensive project was subsequently active online during the COVID-19 pandemic and later presented at Muza Eretz Israel Museum, Tel Aviv, in 2022.

Navigating the myriad ways in which visual representations of medical culture affect the collective unconscious, A. Ben Ron’s work offers new modes of seeing, understanding, and internalising the very systems that shape our lives.

A. Ben Ron has been a professor in the Department of Fine Arts at the University of Haifa since 2007. In 2016, she also began teaching in the Photographic-Communication Department at Hadassah Academic College in Jerusalem. In 2021, she took on a position at the Visual Literacy Studies Program at the Kibbutzim College in Tel Aviv. She is the recipient of the Creativity Encouragement Prize from the Israeli Ministry of Culture and Sports (2016 and 2005), the Isracard and Tel Aviv Museum of Art Prize for an Israeli Artist (2009), and the Minister of Culture Prize from The Israeli Ministry of Culture and Sports (2008).